I'm a frontend developer. Or am I?

As a frontend developer, I've always found it difficult to draw the line between what is considered to be frontend and backend development. Apparently I'm not alone in this!

My first job in a digital agency involved me working with HTML, Sass, and Coffeescript to build websites that match as closely as possible to the designs provided by the design team. In addition to this, I would work with Ruby on Rails, which our custom CMS was built on, to pull through data into the views.

I had a great mentor in that job, who taught me so much about Sass and code organisation, which I'm still very passionate about today (I can't thank you enough Simon!). As a junior I was thrown in at the deep end, and for me it was the best way to learn.

In my mind, this was a frontend developer's role, and it felt clearly defined at the time.

A new chapter

In 2015, I moved to a different digital agency. The frontend developers wrote HTML, Sass, and some JavaScript, and then passed it all on to the backend developers to hook up to the CMS.

Things have changed a lot since then, and now our frontends work with the CMS and C# Razor markup, as well as React and Vue when required. But it seems that since frontend frameworks have gained more popularity, the definition of what a frontend developer actually does has become even more blurry.

Other people can sometimes struggle to know which tasks are frontend and which are backend. Sometimes I feel as though people don't entirely realise the amount of work that is involved in frontend development.

We're in a sort of hybrid role that works between designers and backend developers to make sure your website looks awesome and performs well.

It also becomes difficult when recruiting new frontend developers. As a company, we pride ourselves on building websites that match our designs as closely as possible. People will literally tell me if an icon is a few pixels out. And I know what you're thinking, but that's not a bad thing. It has made me better at my job and the smallest changes like that can have a massive effect on the final product. Everyone in the company knows this. It's a team effort and it's constructive. No one takes it personally. Everybody cares deeply about what we're creating.

The difficulty in recruiting a new frontend is that we need someone who is extremely capable with HTML, Sass, styling, and the design side of things - but also a great JavaScript developer. And it seems that they are more divided than ever these days.

The questions I have for the dev community are:

Does anyone else struggle with this, or is it just me? 😁

As a frontend developer, what do you consider your role to be? How would you define it?

Do you feel that the title 'frontend developer' is appropriate for the vast amount of skillsets it covers?

Have you had similar experiences in terms of recruitment, and finding someone with the same expectations in the role?

I think it's an interesting discussion and I have heard of instances where frontend developers feel under-appreciated because people "don't really know what they do". Also for the sheer amount of skills they are expected to know, in comparison with backend development.

Like any generalization of a complex topic, trying to pigeonhole a software developer into one of two categories is going to fail pretty massively at being descriptive of what they actually do. Like they are two separate checkboxes that have nothing in common. The fact that if you ask 5 different people what the terms mean you will get 7 different answers, and that every 5 years those 7 answers change, means to me that the value of these two terms is less than zero.

Yeah agreed, when recruiting we should try and avoid pigeonholing people as much as possible. This is something for me to think about, in terms of trying to get across the experience required > the job title/tools used.

Dividing the two disciplines was something I didn't like, and was quick to change when I started haha.

I agree about not splitting them, and I mostly think of myself as just a “developer” because like you said, I do some tasks that could be considered “backend”. However there are still different skill sets involved.

So I was originally hired as a UI developer. And yet most of the code I've written is for back-end code and minor tweaks to the front-end (none of them with styling). I think the divide of what is considered the front-end and back-end is more prevalent than ever.
Designer = Front-end dev role
Front-end Dev = Full-stack Dev role
Full-stack Dev = Unicorn 🦄

My position is officially "Front-End Developer". I primarily write and develop components for use in A/B testing. Primarily. I've also been developing a lot of tooling for helping make that process faster and more efficient.

Are these back-end tools? They're not running on any server, so I hesitate to call them back-end tools and myself a full-stack developer (at this job), but these tools aren't used in the front-end either.

I'm also on a very small team and have been heavily involved in trying out different tech and making overall design decisions for what we do. Does this now make me an engineer? I have no idea. Am I still a front-end developer?

The problem I have is that everyone recruits for "frontend developers" and ask for HTML, CSS and JavaScript but when you dig into the roles the things you'll end up doing are really different. In one company you'll be writing a lot of CSS and thinking and about designs and UX, but in another you'll be writing mostly React/Angular and thinking about managing state and API calls - I find it really difficult to look for frontend jobs because of the vagueness of the term "frontend developer" 😥

When I started working on React.js I knew it was the end of the separation between traditional frontend and backend. A colleague of mine and I where thrilled as we got to work on both logic and presentation (we are both full stack devs). Then I started to notice a lot of really great traditional backend devs who got thrown into the world of React and now struggling to grasp how to convert a visual design into a working html/css. It really baffled me why since Frontend devs have always been looked down upon by Backend devs. After all It's JUST HTML/CSS right? Now they know that is WRONG! It takes a really creative mind to look at a visual design and then architect/craft that into SEMANTIC ACCESSIBLE html/css. One thing is for sure, both traditional frontend and backend devs have now found new appreciation and respect on each other's expertise.

One of the things I've observed around the terrible-toggle of Front-end/Back-end is that there are two different perspectives of it - from the technical-side and the business-side.

You've already touched on the technical-side, where you tend to find people that fit the Back-end profile (system-programmers, micro-services, "everyone should learn C as their first language", etc) that 'look down' on people that fit the Front-end profile (Web-programmers, mobile, "everything that can be written in JavaScript should be written in JavaScript", etc) as a lower class of developers. This is a well-worn topic that I don't have much to contribute to other than the fact that I think it's bunk. We're all trying to solve the same 2 hard problems - cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.

But that's an us-vs-them story between equals. The other side is management-vs-employees.

Senior management, like executives, look at things with a much wider lens and cannot deal with all the minutia of who does exactly what. Anyone who has been involved in any sort of long term planning/scheduling has experienced the process of dealing with the concepts of Person-months or Full-Time-Employee (FTE) months estimates against available capacity. It's obvious that treating everyone as interchangeable cogs is fundamentally flawed and yet if you need to do this sort of planning and you have more than 5 devs you need to do some sort of abstraction and generalization. I think the Front-end-vs-Back-end is too high-level and too general a solution but if you need a few, simple terms for C-levels to use across the industry I don't have a better answer 😛.

Isolation is the problem, and front-end vs. back-end is the same battle that waged in coding vs. administration. From that battle emerged the concept of DevOps, where things unified, and developers contribute to multiple components.

I see the same thing happen with front-end vs. back-end. If we consider this a protocol split, like a front-end may only talk JSON with the back-end, then a front-end developer will be severely stunted in their abilities. Creating UI's often requires changing how the back-end works. It's counterproductive to require a continual back-and-forth with other developers on every minutiae.

Being labelled front-end would imply your focus is on the UI, the most immediate part of the user experience. You will be the foremost authority when it comes to technical matters in code relating to the front-end. To somehow say this limits the code you touch, is counter-productive.

In all roles where I've worked on front-end, I've always touched code on the server as well. There's no way I'd be able to build the UIs I want without being able to do that.

It's really confusing in these times to navigate between the frontend/backend spectrum. On one hand I have come across job descriptions that wanted html, css, js, sketch, photoshop etc i.e more design related skills, and on the other hand there are job descriptions that want angular, react, python, SQL etc and they both have the same job title - Frontend Developer.

I totally agree with what Michel Klages pointed out. It would also be great if the companies be more open about what type of experiences they are looking for in a candidate and what kind of work they are expected to do on the job rather than just focusing on the job title.

I agree completely! And that's good advice in terms of how companies should advertise for this job. I haven't done much in terms of recruitment before so it's good to hear what people would like to know on a job ad.

I feel like because the technology is growing so fast and it's always changing, every developer feels this way. What is my focus? What is my role?

Most developers are constantly learning and practicing everything it's hard to say until you get a role that demands you focus on x technology.

So it seems open for now but I believe it's safe to break down into:

Front end
Back end
Full stack

And then an explanation with your primary tech stack focus.

Like front end angular or front end Vue or backend python etc., And I also know X technology.

In the case of front end that is more CSS orientated I think the role web designer or web developer seems to still fit even though most people who code CSS probably don't spend a lot of time on the actual design. So even that gets tricky.

If you design websites more and code a little: web designer.

If you design websites a little and code more: web developer.

In the end a company will be small or large. If they are large they're going to need focus on a specific stack. And all you have to demonstrate is that you've built stuff with that stack and you know it well.

If it's a small company they're focus might be on a specific product and are open to you figuring out ways with whatever technology you prefer to simply work on the product.

Thanks for your reply. I think that it's all the variations of the role that make it hard for companies to understand!

I get your descriptions, although I'm a frontend developer and definitely couldn't design a website. Like, not at all. I see a good design vs bad, and can take designs and recreate them very well in code, but you certainly wouldn't want me designing your website 😁

The line has definitely gotten blurry for me very fast in my career. Most of my work as a front-end dev is making UI changes and getting things responsive and accessible. But I increasingly get tasks focused mostly or entirely on back-end changes, such as recently adding model validations to our Ruby on Rails backend.

My rule of thumb for things outside one's speciality is "knowing enough to be dangerous." I try to know enough about Ruby and the Rails framework so I can grasp basic functions and infer how something works by reading it over. I still needed some help to get those validations right, but they were small corrections and not the "you need to do things an entirely different way" kind of feedback. Following this rule I've been helping to blur that front-end/back-end line, but I honestly think that's inevitable for development teams. The rate of change today has just accelerated that.

I would say my front-end title speaks more to my speciality than as a limit to my skills. I learn the most about CSS and JavaScript, but that doesn't mean I won't write Ruby scripts or side-projects either. Semantically, I think web developer titles will communicate more "I focus mostly on this along with other needed skills" instead of "I do this and nothing else."

The downside is how this encourages the "full-stack" myth. Helping more people understand that knowing at least the basics of everything doesn't automatically make them qualified for "full-stack" is a huge challenge.

IMO backend developers are typically the ones who primarily work on C, Rust, Go, or any other low level programming languages.
Anything else is qualified as frontend, or if you feel like you're more than that feel free to call yourself a full-stack developer 😀

Hey Lynne. Great read. A lot of developers feel this same anxiety. If you haven't already, check out The Great Divide by Chris Coyier (css-tricks.com/the-great-divide/).
I don't think it's useless to split front from back. We're developers, we separate concerns. Front end means client side in my opinion. We're concerned with the client, or what the user directly interacts with.
I think the core of this anxiety has grown from the lack of knowledge in hiring processes. Companies love to hire someone who can wear multiple hats instead of multiple people with 'specializations'. From that, Back end, Front end, and Full stack have arisen. Full stack and back end is blurred/confused with architects, dev ops, and admins. Front end is confused/blurred with Full stack and UI/UX design. UI/UX designers are now being blurred/confused with Front end developers. There is a need to have an understanding of the different disciplines, but actually EXECUTING the work requires a specialized focus in my opinion. Cross-discipline collaboration is best when individual specialists are collaborating - not when one individual is expected to work cross-discipline.
Again, it comes down to the problems with how companies are hiring, and then it just snow balls out to headhunters and agencies, and then again to developers who are just trying to give themselves the best chance of being employable.
Look at this job description I just found in 5 seconds with Google for a 'Front end/UI Developer':
Preference would be given to candidates with:

Experience with .NET/c#/ASP.NET MVC

Experience with JavaScript and Front-End Frameworks (such as React.js)

Thanks for your reply! I have read The Great Divide by Chris Coyier, and it's a great in-depth look at these issues.

I wanted to get the Dev.to community's thoughts, discussion, and experiences on this as it is all so varied.

From my experience (and I'd hope it's the same for others), it's not as big an issue when you've been with a company for a while and they respect you, listen to you, and can recognise where your skills are and how to get the best from you. But I'd imagine, and I might be wrong of course, that it would be a bit of a nightmare for a junior dev right now who isn't quite as sure of what they are capable of yet. Trying to find work with such a variable job spec.

I think the best companies can do for now is be more up front about what they actually require you for when recruiting, and what specific skills are key to the role.

I think the biggest fault was muddying the title of Designer.
Yes, when you devise the shape of a public web/programmatic API, you can say you are designing it. Yes, devising a schema for your data in a database engine can be called "design" (as opposed to "engineering" and "programming", which sound like developing/extending the DB engine, and "administrator" which sounds like application-agnostic Ops).
But a front-end designer is an actual traditional "designer".
You might as well call them a web designer, if that didn't have a connotation of traditional flat sites as opposed to rich apps.
They aren't about the accessibility, they aren't about the usability (that's UX), they just implement what the...
Wait. Who is the one that draws mockups in Photoshop/Illustrator or specialized wireframing software? Not graphic designers, those make art and illustrations. Not brand designers, those are about the style, not the particular screens.
Oh no.
We are doomed.
I thought I could define them by what they are not.
But we don't have enough things names.
This is the end.